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‘It’s Us or Them’: Prospect of Israel-Hezbollah War Rises as Iran-Backed Terrorists Ramp Up Drone Strikes
Flames seen at the side of a road, amid ongoing cross-border hostilities between Hezbollah and Israeli forces, close to the Israel border with Lebanon, in northern Israel, June 4, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Ayal Margolin
An explosives-laden drone launched by Hezbollah from Lebanon injured 11 people in a northern Israeli town on Wednesday, further raising the specter of a new front opening amid rapidly escalating tensions between Israel and the Iran-backed terror group.
Hezbollah, which wields significant political and military influence across Lebanon, took responsibility for launching “several projectiles” at Israel, it said, including two that hit a soccer field in the Druze town of Hurfeish, where sirens were not activated. At least one person was critically wounded and a further 10 evacuated to a hospital. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said it was investigating why the incoming projectile alert sirens did not sound.
Early reports from military sources indicate the drone attacks occurred in quick succession, with the second appearing to intentionally target emergency responders rushing to aid victims of the initial blast, a tactic repeatedly used by Hezbollah terrorists during the current conflict.
The attack came hours after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned that Israel was prepared with an “intensely powerful” response to Hezbollah.
“Whoever thinks that he will attack us and that we will stand idly by is gravely mistaken,” Netanyahu said. He made his remarks during a tour of Israel’s charred north 48 hours after projectiles from Hezbollah had sparked several massive fires in the area, burning entire villages. More than 4,500 missiles and drones have been fired from Lebanon since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war to the Jewish state’s south in Gaza.
Israeli President Isaac Herzog offered prayers for the full recovery of the victims of the Hurfeish attack.
“The world needs to wake up and understand that Israel has no alternative but to safeguard its citizens, and should not be shocked when Israel responds aggressively,” Herzog said.
Israel has stepped up its own attacks against Hezbollah, targeting “significant assets” as well as senior commanders of the group, the IDF said.
According to diplomatic sources, the US and France have been engaging in shuttle diplomacy between Israel and Lebanon for several months now, in an effort to develop a potential negotiated resolution to the conflict.
The key goal is to facilitate the withdrawal of Hezbollah’s presence to over 6 miles north of the Israeli border, beyond the Litani River, and to allow either the Lebanese military or an international peacekeeping force to move into the vacated area along the border. As part of the proposed framework, Israel and Lebanon would also work to resolve longstanding border demarcation disputes between the two nations, The Wall Street Journal reported.
But Sarit Zehavi — a resident of northern Israel and the founder and director of Alma, a research center that focuses on security challenges relating to Israel’s northern border — told The Algemeiner that anything short of destroying Hezbollah would result in a “massacre” of a scale larger than Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel.
“Everyone understands the cost of war here, but at the same time everybody understands that if it will end up with a ceasefire that would take us back to Oct. 6, this will mean another massacre of Israelis by Hezbollah since Hamas actually replicated the Hezbollah plan to occupy the Galilee,” Zehavi said.
The overwhelming sentiment, she said, is that authorities are failing to take adequate measures, both offensively and defensively.
Zehavi pointed to the lack of bomb shelters in the area and the threat of anti-tank missiles that has become a daily reality over the past eight months, with Hezbollah launching strikes that cannot be intercepted by the Iron Dome air defense system and that often arrive without rocket siren warnings.
Compounding concerns, she said, is an alarming surge in attack drone activity from Hezbollah, especially over the last two months, with numbers sharply increasing month-over-month.
“Hezbollah is deliberately escalating the situation to try to drag Israel into war,” Zehavi told The Algemeiner. “I believe this was Hezbollah’s aim from the beginning. It’s not deterred; it’s not interested in a ceasefire. If there will be a ceasefire in Gaza, Hezbollah will follow, but only in order to recover and to execute a massacre at its most convenient timing.”
More than 80,000 Israelis evacuated Israel’s north in October and have since been unable to return to their homes. The majority of those spent the past eight months residing in hotels in safer areas of the country.
One of them, Avi Vanunu, said that unless Israel embarked on a full-scale invasion of Lebanon soon, returning home to his border town of Kiryat Shmona wouldn’t be possible “even in ten years’ time.”
“I don’t even know if my house is still standing or if it was hit by a rocket,” he told The Algemeiner. “Tonight’s attack [on Hurfeish] just proves: It’s us or them.”
The only comfort he took, Vanunu said, was in the fact that Hurfeish was a Druze village, with many residents who had served as Border Police officers and in the IDF in senior positions.
“This won’t pass easily,” he said. “Just look at how they reacted after that Druze boy was kidnapped.”
Vanunu was referring to a Nov. 2022 incident in which the body of a Druze Israeli teen was stolen by terrorists from a hospital in the Palestinian city of Jenin, prompting widespread anger and several revenge attacks from members of the Druze community, including kidnapping Palestinian laborers in Israel and throwing explosive devices in West Bank towns.
Maj. Shadi Khalloul (res), an expert on Hezbollah and Lebanon, called the efforts to push Hezbollah away to past the Litani River “a joke.”
“It’s deceiving Israeli citizens again. It’s dangerous. We should fully destroy [Hezbollah],” Khalloul, who also serves as the president of the Aramaic Christian Galilee Center, told The Algemeiner, warning that if Israel failed to do so, the terror group would be prepared to “destroy Israel together with a nuclear Iran.”
The post ‘It’s Us or Them’: Prospect of Israel-Hezbollah War Rises as Iran-Backed Terrorists Ramp Up Drone Strikes first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan Officially Sanctioned by Trump Admin, Banned From Entering US
International Criminal Court Prosecutor Karim Khan speaks during an interview with Reuters in The Hague, Netherlands, Feb. 12, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Piroschka van de Wouw
The United States has imposed sanctions on International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor Karim Khan in accordance with an executive order signed by President Donald Trump, the US Treasury Department confirmed on Thursday.
Khan was sanctioned by the US after spearheading the ICC’s issuing arrest warrants for Israeli leaders over their role in the ongoing war against the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas in Gaza.
The White House announced on Monday that Khan would be the first member of the ICC to be issued personal sanctions, and both the White House and Treasury Department noted on Thursday that he has been added to the Office of Foreign Assets Control’s (OFAC) Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List.
Khan’s assets in the United States are now frozen, and he is banned from entering the country. The announcement came on the heels of Trump’s executive order last week to punish members of the ICC for targeting Israel.
Trump’s order lambasted the ICC for its “illegitimate and baseless actions targeting America and our close ally Israel.” Trump stated that the ICC “abused its power” to pursue an unsubstantiated and politically motivated criminal case against Israeli leaders.
The ICC responded to Trump with a forceful condemnation, stressing that the court produces “independent and impartial” work.
“The court stands firmly by its personnel and pledges to continue providing justice and hope to millions of innocent victims of atrocities across the world,” the ICC said.
Trump signed the executive order after Senate Democrats blocked legislation to sanction the ICC in January. The bill ultimately failed by a vote of 54-45, with Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) being the sole Democrat to vote in favor of punishing the ICC. Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (NY) criticized the bill as “poorly drafted and deeply problematic.” The House had passed the legislation.
In November, the ICC issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant, and now-deceased Hamas terror leader Ibrahim al-Masri (better known as Mohammed Deif) for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza conflict. The ICC said there were reasonable grounds to believe Netanyahu and Gallant were criminally responsible for starvation in Gaza and the persecution of Palestinians — charges vehemently denied by Israel, which has provided significant humanitarian aid into the war-torn enclave throughout the war.
US and Israeli officials issued blistering condemnations of the ICC move, decrying the court for drawing a moral equivalence between Israel’s democratically elected leaders and the heads of Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist group that launched the ongoing war in Gaza with its massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
The ICC has no jurisdiction over Israel as it is not a signatory to the Rome Statute, which established the court. Other countries including the US have similarly not signed the ICC charter. However, the ICC has asserted jurisdiction by accepting “Palestine” as a signatory in 2015, despite no such state being recognized under international law.
The post ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan Officially Sanctioned by Trump Admin, Banned From Entering US first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Boston Judge Dismisses Hate Crime Charges Against Harvard Students for Assault of Jewish Peer
Demonstrators take part in an “Emergency Rally: Stand With Palestinians Under Siege in Gaza,” amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, Oct. 14, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Brian Snyder
A Boston Municipal Court judge has dismissed hate crime charges against two Harvard University graduate students who allegedly assaulted a Jewish student at the school in the aftermath of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, The Harvard Crimson reported on Wednesday.
As previously reported, an anti-Israel demonstration escalated to apparent harassment when Ibrahim Bharmal, former editor of the prestigious Harvard Law Review, and Elom Tettey-Tamaklo were filmed encircling a Jewish student with a mob that screamed “Shame! Shame! Shame!” at him while he desperately attempted to free himself from the mass of bodies.
Antisemitism on Harvard’s campus skyrocketed after the Oct. 7 atrocities. Harvard stood out as a hub of pro-Hamas support for the terrorist group’s massacre of 1,200 people and kidnapping of 251 hostages in the deadliest single-day attack on Jews since the Holocaust. While Hamas’s brutal treatment of civilians — which included rape, torture, and beheading of children — shocked the world and led to international condemnation, it emboldened pro-Hamas Harvard students, and later, Harvard faculty to target Jewish and pro-Israel members of the campus community with harassment and intimidation.
Following the Oct. 2023 mobbing of a Jewish student, Bharmal and Tettey-Tamaklo were charged by the local district attorney with assault, battery, and violations of the Massachusetts Civil Rights Acts, a hate crime statute that forbids the obstruction of “free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege” — to which they pleaded not guilty.
The hate crime charge was dismissed on Monday by Judge Stephen McClenon. The students will still face one misdemeanor count of assault and battery each.
According to The Washington Free Beacon, Bharmal has been continuously rewarded with new and better opportunities since allegedly assaulting the Jewish student. Harvard neither disciplined him nor removed him from the presidency of the Harvard Law Review, a coveted post once held by former US President Barack Obama. As of last year, he was awarded a law clerkship with the Public Defender for the District of Columbia, a government funded agency which provides free legal counsel to “individuals … who are charged with committing serious criminal acts.”
Antisemitism in the US surged to catastrophic and unprecedented levels in 2023 — the year in which Bharmal and Tettey-Tamaklo’s alleged crimes took place — rising a harrowing 140 percent, according to a 2024 audit conducted by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL).
The ADL recorded 8,873 incidents in 2023 — an average of 24 every day — across the US, amounting to a year unlike any experienced by the American Jewish community since the organization began tracking such data on antisemitic outrages in 1979. Incidents of harassment, vandalism, and assault all spiked by double and triple digits, with California, New York, New Jersey, Florida, and Massachusetts accounting for nearly half, or 48 percent, of all that occurred.
The last quarter of the year proved the most injurious, the ADL noted, explaining that after Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel, 5,204 antisemitic incidents rocked the Jewish community. Across the political spectrum, from white supremacists on the far right to ostensibly left-wing Ivy League universities, antisemites emerged to express solidarity with the Hamas terroistr group, spread antisemitic tropes and blood libels, and openly call for a genocide of the Jewish people in Israel.
Such incidents occurred throughout the US. In California, an elderly Jewish man was killed when an anti-Zionist professor employed by a local community college allegedly pushed him during an argument. At Cornell University in upstate New York, a student threatened to rape and kill Jewish female students and “shoot up” the campus’ Hillel center. In a suburb outside Cleveland, Ohio, a group of vandals desecrated graves at a Jewish cemetery. At Harvard, America’s oldest and, arguably, most prestigious university, a faculty group shared an antisemitic cartoon depicting a left-hand tattooed with a Star of David dangling two men of color from a noose.
Other outrages were expressive but subtle. In November, large numbers of people traveling to attend the “March for Israel” in Washington, DC either could not show up or were forced to scramble last second and final alternative transportation because numerous bus drivers allegedly refused to transport them there. Hundreds of American Jews from Detroit, for example, were left stranded at Dulles Airport, according to multiple reports.
In another case at Yale University, a campus newspaper came under fire for removing from a student’s column what it called “unsubstantiated claims” of Hamas raping Israeli women, marking a rare occasion in which the publication openly doubted reports of sexual assault.
Harvard University recently agreed, on paper, to be part of the solution for eradicating antisemitism from its own campus.
Last month, it settled two antisemitism lawsuits, which were merged by a federal judge in November 2024, that accused school officials of refusing to discipline perpetrators of antisemitic conduct. Legal counsel for the university initially discredited the students who brought the legal actions, attempting to have their allegations thrown out of court on the grounds that they “lacked standing” and “legally cognizable claim” even as it proclaimed “the importance of the need to address antisemitism at the university,” according to court documents.
With the settlement, which came one day after the inauguration of President US Donald Trump — who has vowed to tax the endowments of universities where antisemitism is rampant — Harvard avoided a lengthy legal fight that could have been interpreted by the Jewish community as a willful refusal to acknowledge the discrimination to which Jewish students are subjected.
“Today’s settlement reflects Harvard’s enduring commitment to ensuring our Jewish students, faculty, and staff are embraced, respected, and supported,” Harvard said in a press release. “We will continue to strengthen our policies, systems, and operations to combat antisemitism and all forms of hate and ensure all members of the Harvard community have the support they need to pursue their academic, research, and professional work and feel they belong on our campus and in our classrooms.”
Per the agreement, the university will apply the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism to its non-discrimination and anti-bullying policies (NDAB), recognize the centrality of Zionism to Jewish identity, and explicitly state that targeting and individual on the basis of their Zionism constitutes a violation of school rules.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post Boston Judge Dismisses Hate Crime Charges Against Harvard Students for Assault of Jewish Peer first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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US Democratic Voters Overwhelmingly Sympathize With Palestinians Over Israelis: Poll
Voters line up for the US Senate run-off election, at a polling location in Marietta, Georgia, US, January 5, 2021. Photo: REUTERS/Mike Segar.
Democrats in the US widely sympathize with Palestinians over Israelis, according to a new poll.
The Economist/YouGov poll, which was conducted from Feb. 9-11, found that 35 percent of Democrats indicate their sympathies “are more with” Palestinians, and only 9 percent say they are more sympathetic toward Israelis. Meanwhile, 32 percent of Democrats responded that their sympathies are “about equal” between both Palestinians and Israelis, and another 24 percent were not sure.
Notably, Democratic “sympathies” toward Israelis have dramatically declined in the past two months, coinciding with the transition of the Trump administration into the White House. On Dec. 21, according to the poll, 21 percent of Democrats sympathized more with Israelis and 25 percent sympathized more with Palestinians. On Jan. 18, two days before US President Donald Trump’s inauguration, Democratic sympathy for Palestinians climbed to 27 percent. During that same timeframe, sympathies for Israelis plunged to 18 percent among Democrats.
Republicans are far more sympathetic toward Israel than Democrats are, the poll found. Sixty percent of Republicans expressed sympathy with Israelis this month, while 6 percent expressed more sympathy toward Palestinians.
In October 2023, in the immediate aftermath of the Hamas-led Oct. 7 massacre of 1,200 people and kidnapping of 251 hostages throughout southern Israel, 73 percent of Republicans indicated more sympathy for Israelis and 3 percent indicated more sympathy for Palestinians. As for Democrats, 34 percent had more sympathy for Israelis immediately following the Oct. 7 massacre, and 16 percent had more sympathy for the Palestinians.
Overall, although a plurality of Americans still supports Israel, sympathy for the Palestinians seems to be gaining steam. American sympathy for Israelis remained virtually unchanged from Jan. 18 to Feb. 8, dropping slightly from 32 percent to 31 percent. However, sympathy for Palestinians spiked from 15 percent to 21 percent within the same three-week span. According to the poll, American support for Palestinians has climbed to its highest level since 2017.
Trump’s recent proposal to vacate Palestinians from Gaza and build a “Riviera of the Middle East” is unpopular with the American public, according to the poll. Only 19 percent of Americans support the plan, the poll found. The policy proposal suffers from weak support among American liberals, with only 6 percent of Democrats supporting it and 74 percent opposing it. In contrast, Trump’s suggestion to relocate Palestinians into neighboring Arab states enjoys substantially greater support among Republicans, with 39 percent agreeing with Trump’s proposal and 33 percent disagreeing with it.
The growing partisan divide between Democrats and Republicans regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has become a major flashpoint in the 16 months following the Oct. 7 terror attacks. Democratic lawmakers have become increasingly critical of Israel’s approach to the Gaza war, potentially reflecting shifting opinions of the Democratic electorate regarding the Jewish state. Although Democrats have repeatedly reiterated that Israel has a right to “defend itself,” many have raised concerns over the Jewish state’s conduct in the war in Gaza, reportedly exerting private pressure on former US President Joe Biden to adopt a more adversarial stance against Israel and display more public sympathy for the Palestinians. In November, 17 Democratic senators voted to impose a partial arms embargo on Israel, sparking outrage among supporters of the Jewish state.
The post US Democratic Voters Overwhelmingly Sympathize With Palestinians Over Israelis: Poll first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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